Los Angeles: The California Alliance for Arts Education and the Music Center: Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County presented “Education, Creativity and California’s Future” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion today, Wednesday September 29th.  The forum featured celebrities including Jack Black, Ben McKenzie and others discussing arts education and asking questions of the two candidates for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Assemblymember Tom Torlakson and Larry Aceves.

Malcolm Jamal Warner

The goal of the forum was to discuss the plight and promise of arts education in California public schools. Debbie Devine, Artistic Director for the 24th Street Theatre, opened the event by introducing her former student Jack Black. Black spoke about the importance of arts education in his life remarking, “My life was quickly swirling around the toilet bowl about to be flushed. I don’t know what I would have done if I if I hadn’t met Deb Devine, my first drama teacher, who inspired me and for the first time gave me a reason to really love going to school and really opened my mind and soul to an exciting world of literature and communication.”  He continued, “Because it’s theater … I never thought of it as straight up education, I thought of it as an incredibly exciting, fun experience, and all of sudden I knew all these new things and had this incredible education.”

Laurie Schell, Executive Director of the California Alliance for Arts Education, said, “Every one of the panelists that appeared today is a former student of the arts and is now a working professional artist. This forum was a great opportunity to shine a spotlight, literally, on the role arts education plays in developing well rounded, creative individuals who can become actors and musicians but who just as often become engineers, teachers, parents, internet entrepreneurs or business leaders.”  Schell went on to say, “We are grateful that both candidates for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Torlakson and Aceves, made a commitment today to maintaining a central role for the arts in California’s education system.  And lest they forget, the Alliance and our partners will be here on November 3rd, the day after the election, to make sure that commitment is kept.”

Both candidates expressed their support for arts education.  Assemblymember Tom Torlakson said, “I’m here because I do believe, like you that we can turn things around and bring back that well-rounded experience, to create well-rounded graduates who have the opportunity to explore their talents in many dimensions.”  Larry Aceves, a former school Superintendent said, “The arts are not an add-on that you cut, the arts are part of how children learn. The problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity are not an extra, they are how children learn.”

“Students need to have access to all subjects so they can find out what they are passionate about and pursue it, because it’s going to be hard work whatever you choose, but if you don’t love it it’s going to be really hard work,” said Ben McKenzie star of “Southland” and former star of “The O.C”.  He continued, “[We need to] Keep arts education as a core part of any child’s education, as opposed to some kind of supplemental extra curricular thing that we can cut at whim.”

Jack Black & Debbie Devine

Legendary Motown writer/producer Lamont Dozier said, “We all know that if you help nurture a passion for the arts in kids, it’ll keep them off the street and give them something to dream about and reach for.”  Actor, director and musician Malcolm Jamal Warner said, “People are coming together and trying to make sure that the next Superintendent of Public Instruction really understands how strong we all feel about the importance of arts education.”

In addition to the California Alliance for Arts Education and the Music Center: Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County the forum sponsors and partners included: California State PTA, Ovation, The Boeing Company, the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), Yamaha, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and NBC Universal.

Attendees included:

·        LARRY ACEVES: Candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction

·        TOM TORLAKSON: Candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction

·        JACK BLACK: Actor and musician, star of “School of Rock” and Tenacious D

·        WIL-DOG ABERS: Bassist, Ozomatli

·        LITA ALBUQUERQUE: Painter, sculptor, installation and environmental artist

·        TAYLOR DAYNE: Singer and Songwriter

·        LAMONT DOZIER: Writer and producer, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

·        BEN MCKENZIE: Actor, star of TV’s “Southland” and former star of “The O.C.”

·        MALCOLM JAMAL WARNER: Actor, director and musician, former star of “The Cosby Show”

Congress has designated September 13-17, 2010 as Arts in Education Week as an important reminder of the essential role that the arts play in the well-rounded education that all American students deserve.

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Please check out the U.S. Department of Education Blog entry on arts
education.  It asks for reader comments about what schools and districts are
doing, and this is a great opportunity for you to share your stories.

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September 13-17, 2010 is Arts in Education Week

Starting on Saturday, July 31 and continuing until Saturday, September 18, Americans for the Arts Action Fund will coordinate a “50 States 50 Days” initiative that supports local advocacy activities in all 50 states and in as many congressional districts as possible. This summer, the Arts Action Fund is urging arts advocates to use their incredible arts institutions at home to convey their message about the arts in a setting that reinforces themes of economic development; jobs in the arts; arts education; and partnerships between artists, institutions, and local policymakers.

Americans for the Arts Action Fund staff have prepared a Powerpoint and video presentation to walk you through the easy steps to producing an event and using the 50 States 50 Days website to help you spread the word to your community, manage your event, and download materials you can use to advocate for the arts and arts education. This is an important opportunity for you to engage congressional district staff and reinforce your role as a ready resource for members of Congress, their staff, and constituents.

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Click here to read the entire article on Newsweek.com > > >

Originally posted here on Newsweek.com, 7/10/10

The Alameda County Office of Education recognizes the crucial role that career and technical education (CTE) plays in student engagement, achievement, and future success in the workforce. Over the years, we have worked to increase the number of career and technical learning opportunities and the scope of curriculum available to California students. Arts education and CTE are not counterposed. It is our belief that the arts, especially in the state of California, are important career and technical industries, and that performance-based learning through the arts supports career and technical development across industries.

The ACOE’s Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership urges policy makers to adopt educational policies that include opportunities for students to learn in and through the arts as they develop career and technical skills.

Sheila Jordan
Superintendent
Alameda County Office of Education

With the primary election less than a week away, the California Alliance for Arts Education’s survey of candidates for Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) offers voters a way to understand how candidates might impact arts education in public schools. The survey asked candidates about a variety of issues related to arts education, including access, assessment and workforce preparation.

As the highest elected education official, the Superintendent brings a mandate from the public on education issues. The Superintendent has broad powers to intervene in failing schools, set and enforce curriculum standards and interpret education law. To learn more about the role of an SPI, read the CAAE blog, “What Exactly Does the Superintendent of Public Instruction do?” (May 13, 2010).

The Alliance is working with the California State PTA, California Arts Advocates, Arts for LA and 17 other organizations to raise awareness among voters about what is at stake in this often overlooked race. Richard Kessler has praised the survey in his blog, “Nice Work, California State Arts Advocates–An Arts Survey of Candidates for Chief State School Officer.”

For a full list of the survey’s sponsors, see below.

We encourage you to visit the survey, to learn more about the candidates and their views on arts education.

Survey Sponsors include:

California Alliance for Arts Education
California State PTA
California Arts Advocates
California Art Education Association
California Dance Education Association
California Educational Theatre Association
California Music Education Association
Alameda County Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership
Anaheim Alliance for Arts Education
Arts Orange County
Arts for LA
Bakersfield Alliance for Arts Education
Hayward Alliance for Arts Education
Orange County Music and Arts Administrators
Performing Arts Workshop (San Francisco)
San Diego Alliance for Arts Education
San Mateo Alliance for Arts Education
Sonoma County Alliance for Arts Education
South Bay Alliance for Arts Education
Tuolumne Alliance for Arts Education

click to download flyer

View event page at the Oakland Museum’s Official Website.

The promise of equity and access in arts education for all students K-12 during the curricular day, made real by the SFUSD’s groundbreaking Arts Education Master Plan, finds its point of destination in Young at Art, where all who attend may see for themselves the inspiration and creativity inherent in all of our youngest San Franciscans!

Young at Art 2010
Saturday, May 8–Sunday, May 16, 2010
9:30 am–5 pm daily (except Monday, the museum is closed)
All Young at Art events are free to the public.
Website:  www.youngatartsf.com

Festival highlights include:
On Saturday, May 8, Young at Art presents Community Day. Students and local community groups perform from 12–5 pm in the Koret Auditorium at the de Young. Hands on art activities are offered inside the de Young.  12:30–1:30 pm The San Francisco Ballet Center for Dance Education (CDE) proudly presents the 2010 Performance Project, Cultural Connections Through Dance, featuring 100 students from the San Francisco Unified School District.

On Tuesday, May 11, film and video screenings of student works curated by the Education Department of the San Francisco Film Society are featured in the Koret Auditorium at the de Young.

On Thursday, May 13, 2010-ART IMPACT organized by the SF Arts Commission: A lively and entertaining discussion with 49ers Tight End Vernon Davis.  Joining the conversation are Director of Cultural Affairs Luis R. Cancel and San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Carlos Garcia.  VIP meet and greet fundraising reception immediately following at Morton’s The Steakhouse benefiting The Vernon Davis Visual Arts Scholarship Fund!
Conversation 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. de Young Museum, Koret Auditorium To reserve your seat, click here
Fundraiser 8:00-11:00 p.m. Morton’s The Steakhouse, 400 Post Street at Powell, San Francisco Tickets $125
Proceeds will benefit the Vernon Davis Visual Arts Scholarship Fund, which will provide financial support to a San Francisco youth interested in pursuing a career in the visual arts.

On Friday, May 14, Young at Art Community Celebration, 5-8pm (details below).  StageWrite performs in their annual showcase at 6:30 pm in the Koret Auditorium at the de Young. Professional actors perform six insightful plays written by fifth graders from Starr King Elementary School.
On Saturday, May 15, award-winning young writers read works of prose and poetry at 2 pm in the Koret Auditorium at the de Young.
May 11–14 from 10 am–1 pm, community artists offer hands-on art activities in the Music Concourse in front of the de Young.

Community Celebration on Friday, May 14, 5-8pm:
Friday, May 14, a celebration from 5-8pm will feature the Chinese American International School, the School of the Arts Orchestra, Lowell’s Orchestra and a fabulous jazz group of our very own SFUSD music teachers (they have performed at Yoshi’s!) and the prestigious Dreamcatcher Awards, given to individuals that made a difference in arts education  for SFUSD students in 2010. Come help us celebrate and support our students, arts teachers and partners!

Young at Art field trips (FOR TEACHERS & STUDENTS):
The Young at Art performance schedule is posted on the website to consult in regards to field trips.
Classes are welcome to come on field trips Tuesday May 11, Wednesday May 12, Thursday May 13 and Friday May 14th. No reservation is needed at this point. Please come directly to the music concourse to the information tent. All classes must leave their backpacks and lunches at the SFUSD/Young at Art information booth before entering the museum. Teachers will receive stickers for each student and chaperone for museum admission. Art activities will take place in tents by the bandshell in the same area as the information tent. Please make sure to sign up for the art activities as they take one class at a time every 20 minutes in two different tents. This year’s project is a wire sculpture on a small wood square. Students are invited to attend a variety of performances in the Koret Theater and the Bandshell.

Fieldtrip Procedures:
1) Bus drops off students in front of museum
2) Cross Tea Garden Drive and go down into music concourse (you will see banshell and benches)
3) Sign in and get stickers for museum entry (teachers) and  get schedule (also at www.youngatartsf.com)
4) Leave lunches at lunch/backpack area (class)
5) Sign up for art activity.
6) Visit the student art exhibition in the museum
7) Watch a performance in the Koret Theater or the Bandshell

Fieldtrips consist of museum visit to children’s art exhibition, attending student performances and making wire sculpture at the art activity booth in the music concourse. All activities will be in the south end of the music concourse as the fountains are under construction and are fenced off.

Visiting the de Young
The de Young, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and located in Golden Gate Park is the fourth most visited art museum in the nation. It showcases American art from the 17th through the 21st centuries, international contemporary art, textiles, and costumes, and art from the Americas, the Pacific, and Africa.

Address:

Hours:          Tuesday–Thursday, Saturday and Sunday: 9:30 am–5:15 pm
Friday: 9:30 am–8:45 pm
Closed on Monday
Admission:    $10 adults
$7 seniors
$6 youths 13–17 and students with a college I.D.
Members and children 12 and under are free
The first Tuesday of every month is free

The de Young is accessible to wheelchair users.  For information, contact the ADA Coordinator, 415.750.7645 (voice) or 415.750.3509 (TTY)

Leaving arts out of economic stimulus hobbles technological innovation.

As the economy stumbles, the first things to get cut at the national, state, and local levels are the arts. The first thing that goes in our school curricula are the arts. Arts, common wisdom tells us, are luxuries we can do without in times of crisis. Or can we?

Let’s see what happens when we start throwing out all the science and technology that the arts have made possible.

You may be shocked to find that you’ll have to do without your cell phone or PDA. In the first place, it uses a form of encryption called frequency hopping to ensure your messages can’t easily be intercepted. Frequency hopping was invented by American composer George Antheil in collaboration with the actress Hedy Lamarr. Yeah, really.

Next, the electronic screen that displays your messages (and those on your computer and TV) employ a combination of red, green, and blue dots from which all the different colors can be generated. That innovation was the collaboration of a series of painter-scientists (including American physicist Ogden Rood and Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald) and post-impressionist artists like Seurat – you know, the guy who painted his pictures out of dots of color, just like the ones in your electronic devices. The programming inside owes its existence to J. M. Jacquard, a weaver, who invented programmable looms using punch cards. Exactly the same technique was borrowed to program the first computers and is incorporated into modern programming languages.

Then there are all those computer chips running our critical devices. They’re made using a combination of three classic artistic inventions: etching, silk screen printing, and photolithography. Add to that the fact that data from NASA and NSA satellites is enhanced using artistic techniques such as chiaroscuro (a Renaissance invention) and false coloring (invented by Fauvist painters) to increase contrast so it’s easier to perceive important information. (Parenthetically, artists also figured out how to hide information. Camouflage was invented by the American painter Abbot Thayer and during WWI the Vorticists in England and the Cubists in France were co-opted by their governments to design prints to protect troops, equipment, and planes.) Hey, the arts look pretty useful, huh?

School districts cutting arts programs should first consider that playing an instrument activates neuro-pathways to facilitate learning.

By Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times
April 25, 2010

To those who suggest, as many do, that my brain doesn’t seem to function very effectively at times, I know exactly what’s wrong with me.

And I blame my parents.

Never during my upbringing did I hear the words that so many millions of children dread:

“You’re going to take piano lessons, and you’re going to like them.”

My parents never played any instruments, and the only music in my house was TV-show theme songs. Sure, there were music classes in my Northern California schools, but with no encouragement or curiosity, I missed the boat.

So what does any of that have to do with my limited brainpower?

A lot, judging by a growing body of research, and by some conversations I had recently at Santa Monica High. All of which I bring up in connection with layoff notices received by 10 music teachers in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

Measure A on the May ballot would add $198 per parcel each year to local property taxes to make up for state funding cuts, which have cost the district $10 million in each of the last two years. In the short run, the money would be used to save 70 teaching jobs district-wide, including the 10 music positions. It would also keep class sizes from shooting up. But it needs two-thirds support for passage, which will be no cinch in tough times.

All of which takes me back to April 14, when David Robertson, a Santa Monica High alum (1976), returned to campus, made a pitch for Measure A and was treated like a returning hero.

Robertson, one of the brightest conductors in the world of classical music, was in town to lead his St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a Disney Hall performance that night. But he stopped by SaMo High first to hang with members of the school’s premier orchestra and hear them play Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and Bernstein’s Overture to “Candide.”

Robertson was impressed, but not surprised. He told the students that in all his worldly travels, he’s never seen a public music program as good as the one in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, where he sang in first grade, began studying trumpet in fourth grade and played in an orchestra by 6th grade.

“No other program compares,” Robertson said.

In the audience, teachers and parents told me about students of all income levels who have prospered in the program and gone on to great universities, some studying music and some not. Also in the audience was a friend of mine, L.A. Philharmonic violinist Robert Gupta, a New Yorker, who, amazingly, joined the orchestra in 2007 at the age of 19. And here’s where the brainpower angle comes in.

High school music instruction isn’t threatened in Santa Monica just yet, but the elementary school program could take a big hit, which reminded me of Gupta’s theory on how studying music at an early age can develop the brain. And by the way, he’s no slouch on the subject. Gupta graduated from college with a pre-med biology degree at 17 and two years later also had a master’s in music.

“The corpus callosum is enlarged” when you study music, he explained to me at Santa Monica High, saying the expansion of that pathway increases communication between the two hemispheres of the brain.

We were backstage by then and Robertson chimed in, saying the visual, audio and motor skills learned in music build brainpower.

“Any time you learn, what you’re doing is building a network that will fire automatically,” said the conductor, explaining how a musician travels along a C-major scale without rethinking every step in the process.

This kind of development is particularly helpful at an early age, said Gupta, because a child’s brain has many more neurons and is far more active than an adult’s. That’s why it’s easier to learn music, or language, as a kid, particularly if the brain gets lots of exercise.

UCLA professor James Catterall, whose specialty is the connection between artistic learning and academic and social development, suggests that learning music, in addition to developing the parts of the brain that are tied to emotion and empathy, can activate neuro-pathways and facilitate learning in other areas.

More specifically, said Catterall, who happens to be a cellist, singing and playing instruments over the course of several years “can lead to better spatial reasoning skills,” and the benefits can “spill over somewhat to things like mathematics and language.”

And yet across the country, if not on L.A.’s Westside, music and other arts instruction are often whacked or cut disproportionately when budgets are squeezed. They’re seen as appropriate luxuries in good times, but otherwise superfluous and expendable, despite evidence to the contrary.

In Santa Monica and Malibu, lots of kids will have access to private music lessons regardless of what happens in the public schools. But many others won’t. And when you chip away at the foundation of a great community tradition, Robertson said, you diminish the experience for everyone at every level.

“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy,” Beethoven said.

But I think I’ll give the last words to Nietzsche:

“Without music, the world would be a mistake.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Original article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopezcolumn-20100425,0,144861.column?page=1